This page measures programming language popularity by the number of
postings in Usenet newsgroups about the language (restricted to groups
in the comp.lang hierarchy; I have collected some data for the
microsoft.public.dotnet.languages hierarchy, but our server expires
messages from this hierarchy faster, so one would have to scale for
that to get comparable results). This has the advantage that it is
easy to measure. Other, harder to measure, but probably more useful
metrics would be the number of different postings in groups for the
same language (i.e., count cross-postings between groups for the same
language only once), the number of different posters in groups for the
same language, or (not measurable) the number of readers of a group
for a programming language.

Please don't use this page as an excuse to post noise to the groups
for your favourite programming language. That would damage the group,
and therefore eventually reduce the number of postings in the group.

OTOH, if you make interesting postings (including smart
questions) to the languages' newsgroup in a way compatible with
its culture (read the group for a while to get a feeling), you will
certainly be welcome, and help not just the ranking here, but also the
newsgroups and the language.

I have made some postings about this stuff, which you can read for
additional details: